UTUtah State Symbols

The beehive runs through nearly every Utah symbol, and it is not really about bees. Mormon settlers used deseret, a word from the Book of Mormon meaning honeybee, as the name for the territory they proposed in 1849. Congress refused the name but the emblem stuck, and the hive came to stand for cooperative labor: thousands of small efforts building one structure. That idea produced the state motto, "Industry," the state emblem, the nickname, the design at the center of the seal, and the gold hive on the flag Utah adopted in 2023.

Official state symbols

The California gull is Utah's bird because of the 1848 crop crisis remembered as the miracle of the gulls, when flocks of the birds descended on the Mormon crickets stripping the settlers' first harvests. The sego lily earned its place the hard way too: its bulb was a food source Ute and Paiute people used and taught to settlers during the lean seasons of the early 1850s. The quaking aspen replaced the blue spruce as state tree in 2014 after a campaign by Utah schoolchildren, on the argument that aspen covers far more of the state.

What is on the Utah state flag

Utah replaced its flag in 2023, with the new design taking effect in March 2024. It drops the old seal-on-navy layout for a landscape read from top to bottom: a dark blue upper field for the sky, a white band of snow-capped mountain peaks across the middle, and a red band along the bottom for the red rock country of the southern canyons. At the center sits a gold beehive inside a white hexagon, the shape of a single honeycomb cell, with a star above the hive. The earlier flag, a navy field bearing the full state seal, was not discarded. The legislature kept it in law as Utah's historic state flag, and it still flies at many government buildings.

The state seal

The seal is dense with dates. A bald eagle spreads its wings over a shield. On the shield a beehive sits under the single word INDUSTRY, flanked by sego lilies. Two American flags cross behind it, a deliberate statement of loyalty to the Union at a time when Utah's statehood bids kept failing. Two dates appear: 1847, when the first Mormon pioneer companies reached the Salt Lake Valley, and 1896, when Utah finally became the forty-fifth state after nearly fifty years of applications.

Symbols that surprise people

• The Dutch oven is the official state cooking pot, adopted in 1997 for its role in pioneer and Scout cooking.
• Jell-O is the official state snack food. The 2001 designation followed data showing Utah consumed more of it per person than anywhere else in the country.
• Utah has an official state astronomical symbol, the Beehive Cluster, the open star cluster in Cancer that astronomers catalogue as Messier 44.
• The state firearm is the Browning M1911 pistol, named in 2011 to honor John Moses Browning, who was born in Ogden.
• The state has both a fossil and a dinosaur. Allosaurus is the state fossil, drawn from the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, and Utahraptor was added separately as the state dinosaur in 2018.

Neighbouring states' symbols

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